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Comment You all don't understand the magnitude of this (Score 1) 521

This is going to play in the midwest about as well as if the government suddenly decided to outlaw beef. F-150's/Silverado's/Sierra's/Ram's are basically standard issue for men aged 18-55 in the midwest, and the commercials are right, F-150's dominate. Chevy/GMC/Dodge are going to have a field day with this.

The fact that Ford is jumping into this with the F-150 too, and not testing it out on a lesser model first, is just staggering.

Comment He's fighting for his job (Score 2) 165

Microsoft can't seem to do anything right on the consumer front, and while pushing customers into the cloud may get them a nice reliable monthly subscription from a lot of shops, it's also a dangerous gambit, as it increases the odds that shops will abandon the Windows desktop OS or eventually move their services to another provider.

It's a very dangerous time for Microsoft right now. They'll still be selling a whole fark ton of software/services, but if they don't grow at the rate that Wall Street expects them too, their stock will start taking a beating and then the spiral starts.

Comment Apples and oranges here (Score 1) 221

I'm not looking to get the same functionality/features from a streaming service than I am from purchasing digital copies of media. I go in knowing that terms/prices can change at will, but I accept that for an "all I can eat" service.

Comment Be wary here (Score 2) 331

If you're a consultant/outside entity being asked to do this, then no worries. Just tell them like it is. You don't need any kind of technical test here: Just show them the trail of failed projects and unhappy employees/customers and how they all lead back to one source.

But if you are part of the company...or worse part of IT yourself....watch the fuck out.

Something stinks about this. Managers are usually the first target when it comes to determining blame for failed projects/bad internal PR. That's part of their job after all. The stuffed shirts know this, and if it was just about the IT Manager being terrible they'd fire him and bring in someone new. They don't need a third opinion to tell them the head of IT is incompetent. There's something else going on here, probably related to internal company politics, and you need to be sure you're not being thrown under the bus or are risking getting caught in the crossfire.

Submission + - How do you deal with programmers who have not stayed current? 1

skaffen42 writes: The recent Ask Slashdot about becoming a programmer later in life got me thinking about a related question. How do you deal with programmers who have not stayed current with new technologies?

In the hiring process this is easy, you simply don't hire them. However, at most companies I have worked at there are usually a few programmers who have been employed there for long enough that the skill-set they were originally hired for has become irrelevant. At the same time they have not bothered to stay current with newer technologies. They usually have enough business knowledge that they provide some value to the company, but from a technical perspective they are a slowly increasing liability. As an example, I work with a developer who is 10 years my senior, but still doesn't understand how to write concurrent code and cannot be trusted to use a revision control system without causing a mess that somebody else will have to clean up. On top of that he is really resistant to the idea of code reviews, which I think is due to him disliking people he considers junior to him making suggestion about how to improve his code.

So how do my fellow Slashdotters handle situations like this? How do you help somebody like this to improve their skill-sets? And most importantly, how do you do so without stepping on anybody's feelings?

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